A comparison of speech-accompanying gestures and sign language classifiers: a Pilot
study with Swiss German hearing speakers and deaf signers.
Penny Boyes Braem
Forschungszentrum für Gebärdensprache, Basel
Anuschka Curau
University of Bern
This is a pilot study of the use of signs and gestures of Swiss German deaf signers and
hearing speakers who are non-signers. The sign language data, retellings of four
"Sylvester and Tweety" cartoon stories in Swiss German Sign Language by four native
deaf signers, is from the corpus collected by Diane Brentari for her project comparing
classifiers in different sign languages. The same cartoon was later shown to four hearing
Swiss German non-signers whose first task was to retell the story in spoken Swiss
German and afterwards were asked to tell the story again by using only gestures, i.e. with
no voice.
Curau will present her comparison of the speech-accompanying gestures of the speakers
with signs and gestures used by the deaf signers. She focuses on the use of gestures by
both groups of subjects in 'blended spaces' that provide the physical context needed for
the interpretation of the gestures. Boyes Braem will compare the signed data with both
the speakers ' "with" and "without" speech versions, looking especially at "handling" and
"whole entity" classifier signs and gestures, as well as the where eye blinks occur in these
three sets of data.